Conference Presentation, Keynote
Tom Preston Werner at Startup School 2012
- The speaker rejects the premise that raising capital ($100 million) is the primary metric for startup success, asserting that "money is irrelevant" and merely a resource for purchasing assets like office slides.
- Core Thesis: The speaker defines a company as the aggregate of its decisions, which are made by people; therefore, "people are the only thing that matter."
- Early team assembly at GitHub relied on complementary skills and shared backgrounds rather than formal business experience.
- Co-founders included Tom Preston-Werner (front/back end), Chris Wanstrath (Rails expertise), PJ Hyatt (billing operations), and Scott Chacon (Git expert).
- None of the founding four possessed MBAs, executive experience, or a formal business background.
- The team intentionally avoided hiring senior executives initially, believing that "beginner's mind"—unburdened by knowledge of why things are "impossible"—is critical for innovation.
- The team shared a commonality of having worked at "bad companies," using those negative experiences to inform what problems needed solving.
- Early cultural bonding occurred through informal settings (e.g., meeting at a bar), emphasizing the need for alignment on product direction to avoid internal conflict.
- Hiring challenges were acknowledged; the team once fired a salesperson for poor culture fit, establishing that founders must be willing to let people go to maintain team efficacy.
- Early-stage roles were fluid and specialized titles were rejected; the speaker described his early role as "the janitor" fixing things across domains.
- Long-term team stability was achieved by balancing distinct personality vectors: logical/pragmatic, product visionary, business operations, and culture guardian.
- Product Philosophy: The speaker shifts the focus to "product is all that matters," defined by design and user experience.
- Product success is compared to the intuitive nature of an automobile; features should be removed, not just added, to avoid diluting the core experience.
- The mantra "focus over features" was adopted to prevent cluttering the product with unnecessary functionality.
- Design expertise is identified as a non-negotiable founding skill; the team hired a dedicated designer to ensure the product felt natural rather than like an "administrative screen."
- Open source projects are critiqued for lacking design input, contrasting this with the need for intuitive, consumer-grade interfaces.
- Mission statements should be concise (under 10 words) and evolve as the company solves the initial problem.
- Phase 1 Mission: "Git hosting, no longer a pain in the ass."
- Phase 2 Mission: "Make developers' lives better every day" (expanding focus to collaboration).
- Phase 3 Mission: "Making it easier to work together than to work alone" (divorced from software specifics, addressing human collaboration).
- The speaker argues that solving small, specific problems initially allows for scaling to larger missions, noting that GitHub solved "git hosting" before targeting global collaboration.
- Founders face a critical choice between maintaining a "lifestyle business" or reinvesting profits to "change the world," with GitHub choosing the latter to avoid squandering opportunities.
- Philosophy and Culture: The speaker concludes that "philosophy is all that matters," derived from the people who make decisions.
- Culture is not codified by leadership but emerges from hiring; it serves as a primary tool for attracting talent in a competitive market.
- Five core values were established to guide decision-making and culture:
- Optimizing for happiness: Prioritizing the happiness of customers, employees, and shareholders, with the belief that profits will follow naturally.
- Best argument wins: Removing ego from decision-making by focusing on merit and evidence to avoid corporate politics.
- Working from first principles: Rejecting copycat strategies and rebuilding solutions from scratch to fit the unique needs of the company.
- Create super fans: Delighting users through unexpected gestures (e.g., "drink-ups") and measuring support success by user emotional response (e.g., counting exclamation points).
- Be awesome and change the world: A high-purpose goal to drive the company's broader mission.
- Synthesis: The speaker refutes the "false trichotomy" of choosing between people, product, or philosophy, stating they are inseparable like the "three quarks of an atom."
- Mastery of all three elements is presented as the prerequisite for answering how to raise significant capital.
- The $100 million raise is contextualized as a mechanism to avoid squandering the opportunity to solve large-scale problems.
- Market entry timing is deemed less critical than product quality; poor existing products in saturated markets (e.g., pre-iPad tablets) can be displaced by superior design.